ichard Strauss, but not a single sober and virile work of the quality
of _Boris Godunov_. No German musician has opened up new roads. A single
page of Moussorgsky or Strawinsky shows more originality, more potential
greatness than the complete scores of Mahler and Reger. In our
Universities, in our hospitals and Pasteur Institutes, Russian students
and scholars work side by side with our own, and Russian
revolutionaries who have taken refuge in Paris mingle their aspirations
with those of our socialists.

The crimes of Czarism are continually on your lips. We, too, denounce
these crimes; for Czarism is our enemy, and what I wrote but recently, I
repeat now. But it is likewise the enemy of the intellectual elite of
Russia itself. This cannot be said of your intellectuals, who are so
slavishly obedient to the commands of your rulers. A few days ago I
received that amazing "Address to the Civilized Nations" with which the
Imperial army-corps of German intellectuals bombarded Europe; meanwhile
the army-corps of German Commerce (_Bureau des Deutschen Handelstages_)
shelled the markets of the world with circulars ornamented by the figure
of Mercury, the god of lies. This mobilization of the forces of the pen
and of the caduceus, with which in good truth no other country could
compete, has given us additional reason to fear the Empire's powers of
organization, no reason to respect it more. "Civilized Nations" read,
not without amazement, that Address, the truth of which was vouched for
by the names of the most distinguished scientists, thinkers, and artists
in Germany--by Behring, Ostwald, Roentgen, Eucken, Haeckel, Wundt,
Dehmel, Hauptmann, Sudermann, Hildebrand, Klinger, Liebermann,
Humperdinck, Weingartner, etc.--by painters and philosophers, musicians,
theologians, chemists, economists, poets, and the professors of twenty
universities. They learned, not without surprise, that "it is not true
that Germany provoked the war,--it is not true that Germany criminally
violated the neutrality of Belgium,--it is not true that Germany used
violence against the life or the belongings of a single Belgian citizen
without being forced to do so,--it is not true that Germany destroyed
Louvain" (destroyed it? no indeed, she saved it!),--"it is not true that
Germany----" It is not true that day is day and night is night! I
confess that I could not read to the end without that feeling of
embarrassment which I felt as a child, when I heard an